to the Far Blue Mountains (1976) Read Online Free PDF Page A

"Raleigh's land. Is it so grand a place, then?"
    "A broad land, with forest and running streams and meadows the like of which you've never seen. A beautiful land, Mag, a place in which to rear tall sons."
    "I have no sons," she said.
    "You've time, lass. Get that sailorman of yours and come to America. Raleigh is said to be making up a group to settle there, and if all goes well my ship will be back. Peter will know when it comes, for he's to buy and sell for me. Come, I will find a place for you."
    "My father sailed with Hawkins in '67," she said. "He talked much of the new lands, the savages, and the Spanish to the south."
    A thought came to me. "Mag, you've others here?"
    "One man only now. A fortnight or more he's been here. Paid in advance, he did, and well."
    "A seafaring man?"
    She lifted a shoulder. "Who knows? Conrad Poltz, he is, and polite enough, but he does not stop to talk. Not after the first day."
    "What, then? He asked questions?"
    "He claimed knowledge of Jack, that he'd known him. But I do not think he had.
    He was asking about others here. He rises early and spends the day along the river, watching the ships."
    Conrad Poltz. I knew not the man.
    My friend Coveney Hasling might know this Conrad Poltz, but Hasling was also known to be my friend and might be watched. It was Hasling who had, in a way, given me my first chance. He was a kindly old man who was interested in antiquities, and wandered about the country buying old things found by diggers of ditches, cutters of peat, and such like. When I found several ancient gold coins, I had taken them to him, and he bought some, and saw to the selling of others.
    Tallis might also know this Conrad Poltz.
    Peter Tallis was a man of parts, a man of many strange talents. He was a skillful forger, and had been known to prepare documents, alter others, connive in many ways. It was to him I had gone when I wanted a copy of Leland's book on the old places of England. The book was known to exist in manuscript, but no printing had as yet been made, and until I went to America, I'd thought of searching for antiquities to sell.
    Little happened in England that Peter Tallis did not know, and his booth in St.
    Paul's Walk was well situated to hear all that went on, and was the clearing house for information and gossip in all of London.
    London was a vast melting pot, changing rapidly from the somewhat provincial city it had been. Ships were coming and going from the new lands, fishing, trading, attacking Spanish vessels. They brought strange wares to the market places of London, and stranger stories. Men who had been prisoners returned with their tales of the Barbary Coast, of the Levant, of the Guinea coasts and the islands of the sun. And it was Elizabeth who pulled the many strings from behind the scenes as well as in the open.
    More than one vessel that went out to the Spanish Main was secretly financed by the Queen herself. King Henry VIII, who desperately sought a male heir to carry on his building of the English empire, died not knowing what an heiress he had sired in Elizabeth. From his seat in the Valhalla of dead kings, he must have looked back with amazed pride to see what Anne Boleyn had given him in that small red-haired daughter he had seen but rarely.
    My father had often talked to me of kings and men, of governments and battles and the leading of peoples. "A king must think not only of today," he had told me, "but of tomorrow and tomorrow. When a law is passed, he must understand its consequences. Moreover, he must always think of the succession.
    "Henry the Eighth saw very clearly all the enemies England had, and that he must have a strong hand to follow him. We are a small island in a stormy sea, and there are many enemies for such. King Henry knew that we must have the strength to stand alone, and as the years passed and he had no heir, he saw all his work coming to nothing.
    "He married again and again, but there was no son who lived. Of course, Elizabeth